KILLING ME SOFTLY (12 page)

"And if I don't?"

The planes of his face tighten. "Damn it, woman…"

And I know. Despite what he says, despite what he does, all I have to do is look up into his eyes, normally so cool and in control, and I know. There's a ferocity there. An urgency. A desperation unlike anything I've ever seen, and as I stand there in the alley behind Mimi's, something deep inside me comes to life. "My God."

He brings his hands to the wall, splaying them on either side of my face. "Praying won't help,
belle amie."

Zydeco music drifts in from the street festival, but my body stills in anticipation. "Do it," I challenge.

He leans closer. "Do what?"

I tilt my face to look at him, feel the breath catch in my throat. The need roars in my blood. "What you want to do … what I see in your eyes."

He tries to hide it, but I see the flare of surprise. "Why?" The word is unusually rough. "So you can cry foul and have me arrested like the dirty cop you want me to be?"

"They won't arrest you," I say as I go up on my toes and slide my arms around his neck, "if I'm willing."

Still he doesn't move. "What kind of game are you playing?"

It's a damn good question. "The same one you are," I say. "The one you deny." Pushing closer, I feather my mouth to his. "You want me."

His mouth is hard against mine, unmoving. "You really do have a death wish, don't you?"

His control staggers me, the way he won't reach out and take what he very clearly wants—and what I want to give. I feel him against my abdomen, after all. I know.

"What's the matter?" I purr. "Don't tell me the big bad detective is scared?"

A hard sound breaks from his throat. "I'm not scared."

I slide my body against his, loving the feel of all that power, all that control. "Then prove it."

Sometimes during the spring, when the rains come to Louisiana and overstay their welcome, when the sky stays gray and the heavens dump too many inches of rain for a bowl-shaped city to hold, the civil engineers are forced to open the spillway, allowing the trapped waters of Lake Pontchartrain to pour into the low-lying marshland, viciously consuming everything in their path. When I was twelve, my grandfather took me to watch. I remember standing there, marveling at the power of the water, the fierce surge, wondering what it would feel like to be in its path.

Now I know. In history I learned that surrender is a sign of defeat, but there is no defeat in Cain as he hauls me to him and crushes his mouth to mine. There's only strength. And need. So very, very much need it rampages through me much like the water surging through the spillway.

I'm not a wallflower. I've known other men. But nothing has prepared me for the feel of Cain's mouth taking my own, kissing me, possessing with a raw intensity, a driving urgency beyond anything I ever imagined—and I have a very good imagination.

His hands find my face and cradle with a tenderness that rocks me. Dizzily I bring my own hands higher, stab them into his hair. It's softer than I anticipated.

Then on a harsh breath he's pulling back and staring at me, doing something no man ever has: he makes love to me with nothing more than the look in his eyes.

"Wintergreen," he murmurs, and I remember the roll of candy I sucked on while watching him wait for his informant.

The surprise in his voice tells me more about this big, bad, untouchable police detective than any rumor ever could.

"You like?" I ask with a vulnerability that stuns me. His smile is slow, easy, purely carnal. "My favorite," he says, then comes in for more.

Somehow, I know there will never be enough.

CHAPTER TEN

New Orleans, present day

"
C
ain?" In the City Hall cafeteria miles from the racetrack, Gabe pulled his mobile phone from his face to make sure the call had not dropped. It hadn't.

He brought the handset to his ear and tried to make sense of the distorted rumble coming from the Gentilly Oval. His cousin had been telling him about a lead on Alec when he stopped abruptly. Then there'd been a loud crash, as though Cain dropped the phone. "You there? What the hell is going on?"

Nothing.

"Damn it, cuz—"

He heard it then, the sound of murmured voices, one belonging to Cain, the other to a woman, and his concern melted into a combination of aggravation and amusement.

"Call me later," he barked even though he knew his cousin wasn't listening. Stabbing the end button, he stalked to the coffee machine, where the charred remains of the late-morning brew smoldered against the bottom of the pot.

Needing the caffeine kick, Gabe carried the pot to the sink and cleaned it, then ripped open a pouch of dark roast and prepared a fresh batch.

One of these days, he'd sleep for more than four hours at a stretch. He and Val had gone to bed early last night, and though he'd watched her slide the nightgown from her body, he'd fallen fast and deep before she made it between the sheets. Vaguely, as he sank further into sleep, he was aware of the sound of her crying, but he hadn't been able to pull himself back.

Hadn't wanted to face reality.

He'd been awake three hours later, and that had been that. He'd read, worked at his computer, surfed the Net, then given up and headed for the office before the sun had a chance to rise.

Val was right. There were things he wasn't telling her, little pieces of his life that had spiraled away from him. He told himself he was protecting her. He just needed time. He'd gotten in over his head, but he'd find a way out, and everything would be okay again.

Deep inside, he knew he was full of crap. There was no way to turn a foul into a flush.

"It helps if you turn the machine on."

Absently he turned toward the unfamiliar voice, worked damn hard to keep his jaw from chopping open. She wasn't a bombshell, it wasn't that. She wasn't classically beautiful. Her eyes were a little too far apart, her nose a little too crooked, as though it had been broken long ago and not set properly. But the way she looked at him, with a confident knowing in her brown eyes, a bemused smile curving her wide mouth, rattled his cage.

The jolt of familiarity made no sense. Tall and athletically built, with glossy shoulder-length hair the color of chestnuts and that I've-got-a-secret smile, she was not the kind of woman a man forgot. But he couldn't place her.

"Unless, of course," she added as she sized him up, "you're practicing your telekinetic skills."

Now there was a thought. "I can think of far more …
interesting
ways to practice those," he said.

She laughed. "Maybe I should introduce myself before you go too far down that path." She reached around him and pushed the brew button, then stuck out her hand. "Evangeline Marceau."

Gabe put his palm to hers and made a mental note to let the D.A. have it for not warning him. "The new kid on the block." New A.D.A. starting today, Vince had told him. A real shark. But Gabe's mentor had left out the fact that the killer fish was a woman, and a knockout. "Welcome to Sin City."

Her lips curved. "I thought that was Vegas."

The small mole just above her top lip caught his eye. "Maybe. But the way I see it, there's plenty to go around."

"I see," she said, releasing his hand. "Good thing I already know my way around then, isn't it?"

Sin and the city. It sounded like one of those chick movies. "Well then," he said, refusing to let the prosecutor in him go one step further and query as to just what she knew her way around. The city? Or sin? "Care for some coffee?"

"I'd love some."

He was handing her a foam cup when the district attorney took command of the cafeteria. It was like that wherever Vincent Arceneaux went, whether it was a courtroom, the men's room or the poker room at the back of Bubba's. Whatever was happening stopped. People sat or stood a little straighter. Held their cards closer.

Gabe found it all quite amusing.

The change came over Evangeline immediately, the transformation from confident young attorney to wet-behind-the-ears recruit. She smiled anyway, hid her nerves with a disarming curve of her mouth.

"Good, good," Vince said, approaching them. "I see you two have met." He grabbed the pot despite the fact the coffee was still brewing and filled his ancient mug. "Gabe, I want you to show Evie here around, teach her the ropes."

Evie
. Gabe watched her cringe, wondered why.

"My pleasure," he said as coffee splattered on the burner.

"Rumor has it she's a mean card shark," Vince added. "Maybe you should bring her round to Bubba's, let her give you a run for your money."

The visceral reaction made no sense. Gabe wasn't a chauvinist. Not by any stretch of anyone's imagination. So it wasn't that she was a woman and no woman had ever joined their card games before. But Thursday-night poker had always been a rite of passage. And a refuge.

Newcomers didn't belong. Especially newcomers with killer legs and smoky eyes.

And he, damn it, had no business caring one way or the other. "I doubt I'll be going this week, but maybe next time."

"Good enough." Vince shoved the pot back under the stream. "Just don't let me hear any more about you being seen in back alleys with that cousin of yours. The last thing I need is the newspaper running a story about my rising star running around with a criminal."

Gabe felt his fingers tighten around the white cup, crush it into something unusable. "The grand jury acquitted him."

"Doesn't mean he isn't guilty," Vince said, "just that he was smart enough to hide the body where no one could find it."

And then he was gone, leaving Gabe and Evangeline standing like naked strangers in the awkward silence.

Her mouth moved against his with a hunger that stunned him.

Peripherally Cain was aware of the fact that this was Renee Fox, the reporter who wanted to wring him out, but his body didn't flat give a damn. There was only the feel of her in his arms, all soft and fluid, the taste of her on his mouth, the need and the greed and the urgency, the fresh tingle of wintergreen.

That alone should have stopped him.

Instead he hauled her closer. His hands found her hair and fisted, urging her head back for a better angle. She didn't fight him when he tugged, just opened and kissed him with an urgency that fired his blood and numbed his mind. It was the way a woman kissed a man she'd spent weeks and months and years longing for, the kind of frenzied kiss reserved for those plucked from the arms of death.

It was the way he kissed Savannah in his dreams.

That did stop him.

The realization slammed into him, etching reality into sharp focus. He tore his mouth from hers and took her shoulders in his hands, plied her from his body. She staggered and stared up at him, her mouth swollen and her face flushed, her hair tangled. But it was her eyes that got him, the glassy, stricken, incoherent gaze commonly associated with shock.

The urge to pull her back to him, not to his mouth but to his chest, to run his hands along her spine and
comfort
her for crissakes, seared through him more brutally than the way she'd kissed him.

For a man used to being in control, it was not a feeling he could tolerate.

"Not that having you pressed up against me isn't a damn fine sensation," he drawled, and though it took effort, he resisted the urge to slide his hand up her neck and rub his thumb over her bruised lower lip, "but after the last time we spoke that's hardly the greeting I expected. Mind telling me what in sweet Mary's name you're doing?"

For a moment she said nothing, just kept staring at him as if she expected him to vaporize right before her eyes. Then she blinked. "Cain."

She almost sounded surprised.

"Who else—" he started to ask, but stopped when she twisted from his arms and spun toward the stairwell.

"He's gone," she whispered.

Cain squinted, watching the flow of men and women between the racing area and concession stands. "Who's gone?"

She grabbed his wrist and looked up at him, her eyes no longer glazed with passion but hard with resolve. "The man who was about to shoot you."

And then Cain knew. He knew what had triggered Renee's kiss, what her distraction had cost him.

Swearing hotly, he pulled the Glock from inside his sport coat. "Stay put," he ordered. Then he ran.

A cautious woman would have turned and walked away, gotten in her car and out of New Orleans as fast as she could.

The woman she'd once been would have charged after him, determined to be in the thick of the action.

Renee did neither. She stood there with the sea of oblivious racetrack patrons ebbing and flowing around her, staring at the stairwell where a gunman had stood, and Cain had vanished.

God.

It hit her then, the enormity of what she'd done, and deep inside she started to shake. Slowly her hand found her mouth, and her fingers skimmed the flesh that still burned from Cain's kiss.

She'd known coming back would be hard, but she'd trained herself and steeled herself, tested herself without mercy, day after day, night after night, until she was sure she could return to New Orleans and flirt with the life she'd once lived. Walk the same streets. Talk to the same people. Challenge the same man.

All without feeling a thing.

She might as well have convinced herself she could hold up her hands to fend off a hurricane.

She'd just been so sure, damn it. So sure she could remain objective, that all the days and nights recovering from the attack and reading every crumb of information she could find about the investigation had fortified her, stripped away emotion and vulnerability, longing and sorrow, hardening her into a near robotic woman who felt nothing but the burning need to find the truth, and avenge.

Then she'd seen Cain standing in the clearing, the same in so many ways, but horribly changed in other ways, scarred in ways that plastic surgery could never correct, and the illusion had started to crumble. All the pain and betrayal, the heartache and the longing, all those seething emotions she'd buried simmered closer to the surface, lurking and waiting, dangerously close to breaking free.